Time for a Climate of Change

All last week, the bad news about climate change tore through science circles like a twister through Kansas.

First, the International Energy Association (IEA) reported that global greenhouse gas emissions hit record highs in 2010, threatening to catapult Earth over the 2 degree Celsius temperature rise that, scientists predict, will lead to cataclysmic changes.

Already we’re up about one degree – attributed to anthropogenic causes.

That doesn’t sound like much but it’s enough to melt glaciers, cause widespread drought, wildfires, flooding, famine and extreme weather.

Which we're seeing already. Russia and Pakistan last year. Manitoba and Mississippi this year.

Says meteorologist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, “There is good reason to believe that, with as much as an additional 1C or so warming, we might set in motion the irreversible collapse of the continental ice sheets. Their eventual melting would lead to more than 20 feet of global sea level rise--by any assessment, a catastrophic outcome.”

And none of that counts what is already in the system – i.e. those emissions that we haven’t really measured or felt the effects of yet.

“We”  being the operative word.

It’s widely acknowledged that some of the worst polluters – including Canada and the U.S. – will be able weather the coming storms for a lot longer than those wretched millions living in low-lying coastal areas, in rapidly-drying up parts of Africa, South America and Asia and every place where the cost of food takes up the largest chunk of the household budget.

The IEA’s numbers were reinforced Tuesday when the US government’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory announced that 2011 world green house gas emissions were climbing even higher than last year.

Canada, on a per capita basis, has much to answer for. Population and economic growth, oil and gas exports and our love of light trucks have been among the key drivers of our rising emissions. Then there's Alberta oil sands mining which, according to Environment Canada, spews more greenhouse gases than all the cars on our roads combined.

“Unfortunately, far too many are in denial and political action is at a standstill,’’ observes  Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Once the problem is so obvious to everyone, it is far far too late to do anything about it.”

Simply put, although there is some political disagreement, the general scientific consensus is that, in order to head off mass extinctions, huge migrations of climate refugees and, yes, even global warring, carbon dioxide in the air should be cut back to 350 parts per million (ppm) from the current 390 ppm (or so). 

That sense of urgency is why many in scientific circles are advocating non-violent civil disobedience (NVCD) to shake up governments, industry and media.

Even climate change superstar Al Gore has called for NVCD, which involves breaking the law to protest or to call attention to laws or government policies perceived to be unjust.

Three years ago, he said in a speech to the Clinton Global Initiative, "I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

Enough with the greenwishywashing, more and more scientists are saying.

Well-known American environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben founded the grass-roots group 350.org, which attempts to get people all over the world agitating for laws, regulations and policy aimed at reducing GHG (greenhouse gas emissions) reductions.

“We need to do (civil disobedience) on a mass scale," McKibben, author of many books including Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, tells me. “We need to do it in a way that makes one thing clear to all onlookers: in this fight, we are the conservatives. The radicals are the people who want to alter the composition of the atmosphere.”

The idea is spreading.

“Non-violent civil disobedience is justified when there is a history of long-standing harm or violation of people's fundamental rights; when legal and policy means have failed to reduce the harms and violations; and when there is little time remaining to address the problems,” University of New England professor John Lemons and Penn State’s Donald Brown wrote in last month’s Journal of Science and Environmental Politics.

“Simply put, people do not have the right to harm others who have not given their consent to be harmed, and this is exactly what the USA and other countries continue to do,” Lemons told me.

(For more on the theories of justice and civil disobedience, read this. And then read this, the case of one US activist who faces a possible 10 year sentence and up to $750K in fines, even though he never hurt a fly.)

Environmental activists have long engaged in civil disobedience.

Greenpeace, to name one group, has long specialized in it.

In 2009, 20 activists were arrested after they scaled Parliament’s west block, covered it with banners demanding government action on climate change. 

Last week, two members camped out in an 'Arctic survival pod' suspended from an oil rig off the coast of Greenland, in an effort to stop a Scottish oil firm from drilling. The activists demand to know how Cairn Energy would cope with a BP Deepwater Horizon-style disaster if something goes wrong in pristine Arctic waters.

Noted Australian climate advocate Clive Hamilton (Affluenza: When Too Much is Not Enough, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change) insists that the moral obligation to act now trumps obedience to the law.

“Those who engage in civil disobedience are usually the most law-abiding citizens—those   
who have most regard for the social interest and the keenest understanding of the democratic process,” he emails from Cambridge where he is a visiting professor at Oxford.

Civil disobedience has a long and proud tradition, of course. It helped bring about civil rights in the US, end the Vietnam war, and kept loggers out of BC’s Clayoquot Sound. African-Americans boycotted bus lines and defiantly drank out of “whites-only” public water fountains, young men publicly burned their draft cards and thousands blockaded roads to keep pulp and paper companies out old growth forests.

The member-supported Council of Canadians has engaged in all sorts of civil disobedience, including sandbagging towns and provincial legislatures to point out how rising sea levels would affect them.

“It’s not an action to be taken lightly,’’ says Andrea Harden-Donahue, the Council’s Energy and Climate Justice campaigner. “We do believe that all other democratic means should be pursued first and continue to be pursued, even with a civil disobedience strategy.

“But we feel that it is justified to address climate change, especially given that the Harper government has refused to take action, and because of the urgency.”

Most lawmakers – and even most people -- don’t seem to think much of the tactic. Witness police actions against non-violent stunts such as teddy bear catapults at global summits, or citizen complaints of tied up traffic during protests and sit-ins. How many Canadians say that last year’s peaceful protestors at the Toronto G20 Summit should have just stayed home if they didn’t want to be tackled, cuffed with plastic cables and tossed into cages without charges?

“People from across the political spectrum love to praise civil disobedience-- as long as we're talking about past social movements,” observes US journalist Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement under Siege. “For instance, on the very same day that members of Congress were breaking ground for a new memorial honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his activism, a bill was passed labeling civil disobedience as ‘terrorism’ if it is done by animal rights and environmental activists.”

“Most people are divorced from the history of social change,” notes Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema, author of An Action a Day Keeps Global Capitalism Away. “From the eight-hour workday, to women's right to vote, to the end of slavery -- all of these involved good people willing to break the law.”

One much talked-about recent case of civil disobedience within the scientific community is that of NASA climatologist and Columbia University professor James Hansen who, along with others, was charged with obstructing police and impeding traffic in West Virginia, while protesting  mountain-top coal mining.

Here he is on Letterman a couple of years ago, talking about his then just-published book, Storms of my Grandchildren. It's a great interview.

Hansen, who calls climate change “the great moral challenge of this century,’’ has been helping other activists who get into legal trouble, including six Greenpeace members tried in 2008 for vandalizing a coal power station’s smokestack. With his expert testimony, they convinced the court that, despite all the expensive havoc they wreaked, even greater damage – climate change – was being prevented from hurting people.

The decision shocked both government and industry: The activists were found not-guilty by reason of "lawful excuse” -- a judgement which opens the door for more climate justice civil disobedience.

In Canada, we have a somewhat similar but different defence, the defence of necessity. Conceivably, it could be used like the defence of "lawful excuse" was in the UK.

 “We do believe that the law, and actions taken within the law, are ultimately necessary to addressing the problem of climate change,’’ explains Andrew Gage, acting executive director of West Coast Environmental Law in Victoria, BC.

Tomorrow the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change begins in Bonn.

Wait for a lot of blather and political positioning, but not much commitment for change – or even a commitment to make a commitment for change from developed nations. Meanwhile, the poor nations who will take the brunt of climate change will just have to take it.

Me, I am glad I am getting on in years so I won’t have to see what’s coming. I always felt and, as it turns out, scientist Michael Mann sees it the same way, that, well, here's how he in an email: "Of all the early 70s distopian movies, Soylent Green was actually the most prophetic in terms of providing a vision for a worst case anthropogenic climate future..."

 “I don’t think most people realize how little time we have left,’’ warns Lester Brown, founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute and author of the just-published World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.  “The cliff is not that far away.’’

But hey, the disaster folks will make a buck.

JUST A NOTE: In order to do this post, I spoke to many distinguished and committed scientists. I just want to thank those that I cited, as well as those I didn't, including Scott Mandia and Ray Weymann.

HEATING UIPDATE: Well, here's a surprise.

The UN climate talks re-opened in Bonn on Monday with developing countries increasingly resentful that money promised 18 months ago to help them adapt to climate change has not been made available.

New research by the World Resources Institute (WRI) shows that the world's 21 developed countries and the European commission have publicly announced pledges of $28bn in "fast-track" money after a commitment made in Copenhagen in 2009. While this is close to the $30bn promised for the 2010-2012 period, only around $12bn has actually been budgeted for by countries and as little as around 30% has been delivered in some cases.

Change of life

The Star's Peter Gorrie today neatly sums up one of the major flaws in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's supposed ''championing'' maternal health care and child mortality.

It's a point on which I have briefly touched several times.

Here's Peter, with linkage by me:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he wants to save the most vulnerable people on Earth.

"As president of the G8 in 2010, Canada will champion a major initiative to improve the health of women and children in the world's poorest regions," Harper said in a recent opinion article in this newspaper.

Some 500,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth every year, and 9 million kids die before their 5th birthday, he wrote. "Far too many lives and unexplored futures have already been lost for want of relatively simple health-care solutions."

Details are to come – in the federal budget scheduled for next month, and Harper's opening speech to the G20 summit, to be held here in June.

What should we expect from his sudden outburst of compassion?

Here's a clue.

A few days after Harper's article, Environment Minister Jim Prentice spoke in Calgary about climate change. Not only is Canada weakening its target for greenhouse gas emissions "to ensure that it matches exactly" the U.S. goal, Prentice said, but this country will also do nothing until the Americans act.

"We will only adopt a cap-and-trade regime if the United States signals that it wants to do the same. Our position on harmonization applies equally to regulation."

Since the U.S. Congress is unlikely to pass meaningful climate change legislation, and lawsuits will snarl any attempt by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to impose regulations, our government will happily continue the profligate status quo.

This approach hobbles Canada's ability to develop a thriving low-carbon economy: We'll leave that benefit to those with more ambition and imagination.

It also makes a mockery of Harper's pledge to help impoverished women and children. Even if Canada provides ample medicine and food to developing countries – an outcome that's far from certain – his "relatively simple" measures wouldn't suffice because poverty and disease result from social, economic and environmental wounds that require more than bandages.

Just about every major human rights organization I know has reported on how climate change has a greater effect on women than men -- including CIDA which is supposed to be financing this maternal health care initiative. Doesn't one hand know what the other is doing? Or is the Harper government that cynical?

Well, of course. This is the same government that cut off KAIROS -- which helps rape victims and works against environmental degradation -- because, or so Immigration Minister Jason Kenney claimed in Jerusalem, it's anti-Semitic. Which it is not.

Only goes to show how opportunistic Harper's initiative is. How can there be maternal health care and lower infant mortality when there's severe environmental degradation, causing droughts, floods, landslides?

It's women who walk miles to find water, kindling, fuel, food. It's women who are the back of the line when resources are scarce. It's women who are savaged when there are wars for food and water.

Continues Peter:

"If we invest in women's health while ignoring the impact of climate change, then, we're doomed to failure," says Robert Fox, executive-director of Oxfam Canada.

The most recent United Nations report on The State of the World's Population explains why:

"Women ... are among the most vulnerable to climate change, partly because in many countries they make up the larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer income-earning opportunities.

"Women manage households and care for family members, which often limits their mobility and increases their vulnerability to sudden weather-related natural disasters. Drought and erratic rainfall force women to work harder to secure food, water and energy for their homes. Girls drop out of school to help their mothers with these tasks (creating a) cycle of deprivation, poverty and inequality."

As climate change threatens their survival in rural areas, people flee to cities; forced into crowded, squalid conditions where food and water are scarce and diseases flourish. The precarious homes of these climate refugees are usually first to be destroyed in a storm or flood.

In general, women are more likely than men to die in weather-related disasters, which have increased four-fold over the past 20 years.

Sending traditional aid into these situations could ease some pain, but it's akin to pouring water into a bottomless bucket.

If Harper were serious about his new campaign, he'd put Canada in the lead on climate change rather than keep us a laggard. He'd make that policy part of a coherent effort to change the conditions that condemn so many women and children to desperate, short lives.

"We don't see them connecting the dots," Fox says.

Worse, they act as if the dots don't even exist.

The Harper Government: Working Hard to Get Those Left-Wing Fringe Group Votes.

Electile dysfuntion

Here's an absolute must-read by my Star sistah Susan Delacourt.

It's all about how the Liberals are wining that ''left-wing fringe group'' called women while PM Stephen Harper is playing to the oil guys and cowboys -- at the expense of the environment and Canadian unity, according to my other Star sistah Chantal Hebert.

Not surprisingly, its headline reads ''PM from Mars, Iggy from Venus?'' and it shows how Harper's Johnny-come-lately position on maternal healthcare, not to mention his utter disdain for the plight of our own First Nations kids, could make all the difference during the next election. I added the boldface.

... when Harper talked to Sports Illustrated this week about the "tough and aggressive and ambitious" traits of the Canadian national psychology – comparing it to the skills needed for hockey – it's entirely possible that those words found their mark with women. And child care may be as much a men's issue these days as it is a concern for women.

What may have an effect, though not strictly down the gender divide, is Ignatieff's rather risky decision to raise the subject of abortion.

He did it on Tuesday in the context of Harper's new foreign-aid priority – the Liberal leader asking whether help for women abroad would include aid to organizations that support access to safe abortions. This is a hot-button issue for largely Conservative, anti-abortion advocates. In fact, support for abortions is exactly what groups such as Campaign Life were asking Harper to avoid in the wake of his announced new focus on foreign aid for women.

Officially, Harper's office dismissed the Ignatieff announcement, accusing him of playing political games with an issue of conscience and morality.

Conservatives, however, are in a bit of a glass house when they throw rocks in that direction, with their own history of attacks on Liberals over sensitive issues such as anti-Semitism, patriotism and support for the troops. In many ways, this was a deliberate Liberal effort to turn those visceral, wedge tactics back on the Conservatives.

And unofficially, Conservatives were counselling each other to avoid falling into the Liberals' trap this week – to not get baited into another polarized debate on abortion, which, history shows, tends to drive more voters away from the Conservatives than it attracts.

The irony is, the Con men are caught between a rock and a hard place here. If they say they don't want to re-open the abortion debate -- as if it ever closed -- they'll anger their socially regressive base. If they do start talking about abortion, and let all those caucus members, overwhelmingly anti-choice, start yapping, then the Cons will drive away the fiscal conservatives who are socially progressive.

Heh.

Meanwhile, NDP leader Jack Layton, who today announced that he is battling prostate cancer, is getting in on the maternal healthcare action. Monday, he's holding a newser to ''challenge his three federal counterparts to seek common ground to make the concerns of women and children in Canada a priority in the next session of Parliament.''

Heh-heh.

Guess we're gonna see a lot more blue sweaters and kittens during the campaign.

Breeding grounds

“Missing” A message about maternal mortality from Big Yellow Taxi on Vimeo.

Many right-whingers think I bash Prime Minister Stephen Harper for sport.

Wrong. I bash Harper because just about everything he does, at least when it comes to women, is wrong.

Just look how Canadian women have fared throughout his reign rule government. According to the World Economic Forum, which publishes an annual Global Gender Gap Index, Canada slipped from 14th place to 25th.

So guess where Harper was last week, banging the drum for his new cause -- women? (This is a spoof video. Pity.)

That's why I wrote Friday's column, which is still generating hits and emails. I've added some links.

Tuesday, on the Star's op-ed page, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that he would "mobilize" world leaders to save the lives of women and children around the world.

"As president of the G8 in 2010," he wrote, "Canada will champion a major initiative to improve the health of women and children in the world's poorest regions."

He cited some horrifying statistics: "Each year, it is estimated that 500,000 women lose their lives during pregnancy or childbirth. Further, an astonishing 9 million children die before their fifth birthday."

Hmm. These are numbers I have repeatedly noted in this column and on my blog – often to the derision of Harper supporters.(In fact I already posted the UNICEF video you see above last March. But I am reposting it.)

Anyway, there's another statistic, one he conveniently left out. According to the same sources, some 70,000 women a year die from botched illegal abortions.

But let's not go there today.

Now, I am the last person on Earth not to applaud any concerted effort to help women. Feminists have long said that women's rights are human rights – an idea that is finally sinking in among Western leaders.

Improve the lot of women, improve the lives of all.

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed this month, "Well, you know the proverb, `Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime'? Well, if you teach a woman to fish, she'll feed the whole village."

But Harper didn't mention anything about women getting educations or achieving economic parity.

As internationally known human rights activist Stephen Lewis told me Wednesday night, "None of the spectrum of women's rights and issues is encompassed in this announcement.

It doesn't include sexual violence, child marriage, sexual trafficking, female genital mutilation, economic autonomy, political representation, land rights or inheritance rights.

It includes none of the panoply of women's issues which consign women to subordinate positions around the world."

Hardly surprising considering Harper's government record on everything from women's reproductive rights to equality.

And so he plans to help women only as baby-makers while ignoring all the other Millennium Goals to end Poverty by 2015 on the international agenda, including "environmental sustainability."

(Incidentally, many NGOs, including CIDA, report that it's women who suffer most from climate change. Whether they have to walk farther to find water, food or fuel for cooking, their burdens are increased.)

What's more, as Lewis emphasized, other nations have been on board what's known as the Clinton Global Initiative for more than two years. In 2007, Norway and the Netherlands committed $1.2 billion to this. Last year, another $5.3 billion was kicked in from other sources.

But, on Tuesday, International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda would not tell media how much Canada is actually committing.

"It takes a lot of chutzpah to pretend that somehow you're championing something that others have championed so vigorously before you," Lewis said.

It gets better – or worse, depending on your perspective.

On Wednesday, Liberal Status of Women critic Anita Neville told me, "Mr. Harper is not looking at these issues in Canada. Take a look at the aboriginal population. Look at maternal health care here. He's got a lot of work to do here. "

Indeed, this week, a massive new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal reported that Inuit infants die at more than three times the rate of other Canadian babies.

Last week, the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health reported on Canada's sinking infant mortality record – we're now 24th in the world – while revealing Saskatchewan's shocking numbers of aboriginal infant deaths. (There's a PDF Download Pages from PaedsJan2010_Blues here.)

And yet, Saskatoon Conservative MP Brad Trost is campaigning to eliminate Canada's funding to the International Planned Parenthood Federation – which is not only about contraception but also about maternal health care.

Concludes Lewis: "I think it's pretty cynical but, now that they're doing it, maybe they'll be forced into making some financial commitment."

Women are watching, and waiting.

Lots of Broadsides' pals also weighed in on the subject. Montreal Simon, Dammit Janet and StageLeft to name a few.

And here's my longtime friend Gerry Caplan in that other paper.

I said that maternal and child health could he helped significantly by inexpensive interventions, as has been shown in many countries. But if anyone is genuinely interested in the overall well-being of women and children, which ultimately will determine both their quality of life and their mortality, larger issues of development and women's rights must be pursued diligently. Birth control, abortion, sexual violence, child marriage, land and inheritance rights, political rights – all these issues related to women's subordination must be faced if their overall physical and mental health is to be improved. Is Mr. Harper ready to sign on to this program?

I'm sure the Prime Minster is well aware that his government cut off funding for Kairos, the church-backed Canadian NGO. I wonder if anyone has told him that Kairos worked in the Congo with a Congolese group that was planning to set up a legal clinic to protect women's rights. One of its intended projects was to support Congolese women who had been raped. Renewing the Kairos CIDA grant would go a long way to convincing Canadians that he is sincere in his concern for women's health.

(The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof wrote this about life for women in the Congo just the other day.)

Here are some other things that didn't make the final cut.

BQ MP Nicole Demers emailed me to say

It is with surprise that I learned of Stephen Harper's desire to help the women and children of the world. How can he be so callous when one million Canadian children don't have enough to eat? You have to wonder how does he want to help them? What does he hope to get from it, especially when he cut off help to some of the poorest countries? What about those women and children?

I heard from a reader who wanted to point out that, in spite of what I see as hypocrisy and opportunism on Harper's part, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada applauded his announcement. 

But guess who wasn't happy? The HarperCon Cheering Squad over at the anti-choice Lifesite News.

Pro-life leaders are calling on Canadians to contact the Prime Minister and International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda, and ask them to ensure that the government does not cave in to pressure to push abortion and population control as part of the initiative.

No, because, after all, handing out contraception, or helping women to get abortions when they already have more mouths than they can feed or care for, just wouldn't be fair to women, right? And how come all the anti-choice ''leaders'' quoted are, um, men?

Finally, this incredible piece.

Pro-life leaders are calling on Canadians to contact the Prime Minister and International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda, and ask them to ensure that the government does not cave in to pressure to push abortion and population control as part of the initiative.

<SNIP>

I asked Minister Oda whether the Harper government was leaning toward the aggressive family planning model or favoured the building of local health clinics. While Minister Oda said she was seeking the best advice and not leaning in any direction at this point, one of the experts around the table nodded her head in agreement as I asked my question. Jennifer Kitts from Action Canada for Population and Development approached me excitedly after the news conference to tell me that family planning is key to reducing maternal mortality and infant deaths.

Kitts says that 30% of maternal deaths can be avoided and infant mortality can be reduced by 20% with proper family planning. Now I quickly understood how family planning could reduce maternal death but when I asked her to explain how family planning could help children live past their 5th birthday, Ms. Kitts became nervous and asked me to turn off my recorder. I asked her the question again and she told me she would have to do the interview later.

I don't know why Kitts would be so skittish. It's easy to answer the question. A woman not exhausted by multiple childbirths -- not to mention inferior nutrition and bigger burdens than the menfolk -- can't adequately care for too many children. This is why 70,000 women a year die from botched illegal abortions. That is why so many women die in childbirth. This is why so many kids don't make it to age 5.

Your chances of survival aas a child in these hellholes aren't great if your mother is dead.

But, with these people, the fetus reigns supreme.

As for women, well, dead or alive, they're just a political means to an end ...

United Nations Millennium Campaign - Goal 5- Maternal Health - More amazing video clips are a click away

Hotwire

Maybe if they wore fewer layers?

I guess they made this between jetting to their fashion shows and shoots all over the world.

I prefer this one.

Bet the superhotties will go viral first. It might take some people repeated views until they get the message.

Future Shock

Wow.

More here.

Greenwashing

Green is an award-winning documentary, without words, told from the point of view of a rescued orangutan in Indonesia.

The filmmaker uses point-of-view and dutch-angle shots to place us into the orangutan’s perspective. As the story continues, Green’s perspective is juxtaposed with the process of development destroying her home through deforestation to biodiesel production. It’s a gradual transition into the harsh reality of globalization. The forest is destroyed, primates suffer, palm oil is manufactured, and the fast-paced urban world seems oblivious.

“Her name is Green, she is alone in a world which doesn’t belong to her. She is a female orangutan, victim of deforestation and palm oil plantations.”

Stunning, eye-opening, heart-breaking, and totally worth 48 minutes of your time. The director wants as many people as possible to see it so it's a free download, or you can stream it live.

Click here. And yes, older children can, and should, watch.

If you're feeling smug about some of your ''green'' products, this will come as a shock.

More about the endangered orangutans, called the ''thinkers of the jungle,'' here and here.

Don't fail the whales

Yes, it's an ad. So what? It's stunning.

Don't let the world turn into an epic fail whale.

Save the oceans.

Please.

Madonna can't adopt them all

This can't be good:

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 1 (IPS) - The spreading global financial crisis is threatening to undermine another one of the U.N.'s major development and health goals: family planning.

United Nations officials are expressing fears that planned funding for reproductive health services may fall short of its target.

According to the latest figures released here, international donor assistance to population activities continued to increase over the years - 7.4 billion dollars in 2006 rising to about 8.1 billion dollars in 2007.

The projected funding for 2008 and 2009 was estimated at about 11.1 and 11.2 billion dollars, respectively.

"However, given the current global financial crisis, it is not certain whether donors will live up to their expected future commitments and continue to increase funding levels as they have done in the past few years," says a new report released to coincide with a weeklong session of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development (CPD).

It is possible that the final figures for 2008 and 2009 "will show decreases in levels of funding for population assistance," the study cautions.

<SNIP>

Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS that the funding gap for reproductive health, especially family planning, needs to be urgently addressed to ensure progress.

She pointed out that donor assistance for family planning alone - as a percentage of all population assistance - has decreased from 55 percent in 1995, totaling 723 million dollars, to a mere five percent in 2007, totaling only 338 million dollars.

"If not reversed, the low funding for international family planning threatens to derail our collective efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals," Obaid said.

"We will not eradicate extreme poverty, hunger and inequality, and achieve the other Millennium Development Goals, unless greater attention is paid to population issues and more resources are devoted to women's empowerment and reproductive health, including maternal health care and family planning," she added.

Currently, there are about 200 million women in the developing world with unmet needs for effective contraception, with the highest unmet needs being in Africa.

"Now is the time to re-energise voluntary family planning. There is no investment in development that costs so little and brings benefits that are so far-reaching and enormous," Obaid declared.

Funny how there's always money for weapons but, when it comes to family planning, which could ease the strain on resources -- and hence mitigate conflict -- funding shrivels up.

As Feministing points out:

$100 million of funding for international family planning results in:

• 3.6 million more contraceptive users
• 2.1 million unintended pregnancies avoided
• 825,000 fewer abortions
• 970,000 fewer unplanned births
• 70,000 infant deaths averted
• 4,000 maternal lives saved

Investing in these programs saves the U.S. government a great deal in more costly foreign aid programs down the road.  With 200 million women worldwide who wish to avoid or delay pregnancy but lack access to modern methods of contraception and half a million dying every year from pregnancy related causes, the time is now.

Write to your MPs and tell them you want Canada to support family planning, not war.

(Photo: South Africa-Canada.Com)

Green meanies

Further to Chris Hedges' warnings about how we're breeding like bunnies all the way to extinction, population expert Betsy Hartmann argues that, instead of punishing women in poor countries, what's needed is ''effective and equitable environmental and climate policy.''

Raising alarms about overpopulation distracts us from the real environmental tasks at hand. It also undermines the provision of good quality, voluntary family planning services, instead legitimizing top-down punitive policies that hurt women.

Today's population alarmists are stuck back in the 1960s when high rates of population growth made it look as if the world was experiencing a population explosion. But much has changed since then. While world population is projected to increase from 6.7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050, the rate of growth has slowed considerably. The average number of children born to a woman in the Global South is now 2.75, and the UN predicts this figure will drop to 2.05 by 2050.

Moreover, the few countries that still have relatively high birth rates, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, have the least impact on environmental factors such as global warming. From 1950-2000, the entire continent of Africa was responsible for only 2.5% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Though it is impossible to predict exactly what world population will look like further in the future, most demographers agree we are on the path toward population stabilization with families all across the globe having two children or less. In fact, demographers tend to be more concerned these days about declining population growth and population aging than they are about too many people.

In addition to ignoring the numbers, the focus on overpopulation obscures the ways different economic and political systems perpetuate poverty, inequality and environmental degradation. It places the blame on the people with the least amount of resources and power rather than on corrupt governments and rich elites. The biggest security threat facing the world right now is the economic crisis, caused by a small coterie of greedy financiers and lax governments, ours in particular.

And here comes the punchline:

The population controllers also have blinders on their eyes when they attribute the cutting down of forests, the polluting of water supplies, and the extinction of species to too many poor people, rather than the unchecked power of large corporations to monopolize resources and ravage the land. Missing from the picture is the question of technological choice: for example, reducing the population of automobiles and investing in public transport worldwide would do much more to curtail climate change than imposing limits on family size.

So it's completely up to us here in the land of minivans and fresh blueberries in February, large houses and air conditioning, to change radically .

I wonder if we can.

A friend and I were talking this past weekend about how we have no choice yet we still don't see it. 

But ot's a perfect storm now, a convergence of many factors: the economy, especially the fiscal mess to the south of us, the environmental crisis, the inevitable drying up of the world's oil and fresh water, major shifts in the mediascape plus the presence, if not the participation, of generations raised with communication and organizing tools unlike any that have come before.

If Gutenberg helped launch the Industrial Revolution by allowing people to exchange information and share ideas, imagine what might happen at relative hyper  velocity superspeed online, and with who-knows-what doohickey gets invented tomorrow.

I'm not sure whether to be excited ... or afraid.